Chauffeur™ WDK

The Chauffeur™ framework was designed to simplify the development of workloads for measuring both performance and energy efficiency. Chauffeur contains functionality that is common to most workloads, enabling developers to focus on the actual business logic of the application, and take advantage of Chauffeur’s capabilities for configuration, execution, data collection, validation, and reporting.

When SPEC developed SPECpower_ssj2008®, the first industry-standard benchmark for measuring energy efficiency of servers, they also created the SPEC Power and Performance Benchmark Methodology to describe best practices for future benchmarks and tools developed to measure power and performance of computer systems. As SPEC set out to create the Server Efficiency Rating Tool (SERT™), they recognized that many of these best practices were independent of the actual workload being measured.

Chauffeur was initially designed to meet the requirements of the SERT. SPEC recognized that the framework would also be useful for research and development purposes and is now being made available as the Chauffeur Worklet Development Kit (WDK). This kit can be used to develop new workloads, or “worklets” in Chauffeur terminology. Researchers can also use the WDK to configure worklets to run in different ways in order to mimic
the behavior of different types of applications. These features can be used in the development and assessment of new technologies such as power management capabilities.

April 18th, 2017: The Chauffeur™ WDK 2.0 released
Version 2.0.0 of the Chauffeur™ WDK is now available. This is a major update which
includes many enhancements and bug fixes. Highlights include:
 Support for new operating systems and platforms
 Improved hardware and software discovery
 Reduced memory footprint for the controller system
 Increased flexibility of runtime behavior for worklet developers

Licensees of the Chauffeur WDK 1.x are eligble for a free upgrade until October 31st, 2017